SRI’s Adrienne Woods and marketing expert Julie Kelleher discuss how innovators can position their products for scale.
How can researchers and developers best position their education innovations for widespread adoption? In the latest episode of The SRI Homeroom, host Keith Heumiller is joined by Adrienne Woods, senior education researcher at SRI, and Julie Kelleher, founder of the Kelleher Consulting Group, to share insights and resources from the world of marketing.
Woods, a member of the LEARN Network, emphasized that having a strong research foundation isn’t enough; products and programs need to be positioned effectively to reach the districts, schools, and educators who can benefit most. A key challenge, however, is that many education researchers are not trained to think like marketers, and some even hesitate to use sales language.
“Selling something to market feels a little icky to us. I’ve had conversations with people who have developed these interventions and they want to get them into schools, and I say, ‘You have got to sell it,’ and they’re like, ‘Ooh, sell? I don’t like that.”
Kelleher, drawing on nearly two decades of experience bringing edtech products to market, underscored the importance of understanding key audiences and communicating clearly.
“If you have a good or a service that you want other people to use, whether for free or for a fee, then you need to a go-to-market strategy, to know the cost of [your innovation], how you distribute it.”
Woods and Kelleher shared a range of free resources created by the LEARN Network designed to help support education innovators in bringing evidence-based educational products and programs to market.
These resources include:
- The LEARN to Scale Virtual Workshop, on May 1 at 3 p.m. ET, which will dive into using a systematic approach to bring research to market.
- The LEARN to Scale Toolkit, designed to support researchers and developers in creating, testing, and scaling evidence-based educational products. The toolkit includes a Go-to-Market Playbook to help innovators think about how to focus their marketing and sales efforts on the customers most likely to derive value from their product.
- Stories of Scaling that highlight how other education innovators have successfully brought their products to market.
- Two research briefs that explore how decision-makers in schools and districts evaluate and select products.
Listen to the full podcast episode below.
Browse all episodes of The SRI Homeroom on the podcast homepage.
